paintings and small sculptures to move. Plus the basement occasionally floods a little. Basically there's a large ground-floor recreation room adjacent to the garage, with a nonfunctioning bathroom (horrible sewer issues decades ago), and stairs leading down to a basement/laundry room with a working sink. My elderly father, the one recklessly going to restaurants, supermarkets, and offices without a mask, never uses any of them, because there are short steps leading to a front door on higher ground. So I'll use foam and draft blockers to minimize airflow between the rest of the house and the recreation room (I could go further and try to seal it off, but I'd like to be able to use the door in case of emergencies). Unfortunately only one of the screen windows in the recreation room works properly, but they're willing to have new screen windows installed for the recreation room, laundry room, and the bathroom I'd use in the main house, and I'd place high-powered air purifiers in that bathroom, the recreation room, and the laundry room, and maybe also right outside the door leading from the main house to the recreation room (AKA the wreck room).
I've considered decorating the door to make it look like an air-lock (trompe l'oeil 3D, perhaps), the recreation room to look like a space station (the interior of a space station, that is---not, like, standing on the outer surfaces), and the laundry room to look like a dungeon. (I would be doing their laundry, so they don't contaminate my air space.) But I'll probably just let that be my head canon for time being. Especially with all the massive paintings. (Which, for better or worse, are not of the interiors of space stations, nor of dungeons. Though most of them are pretty abstract, so technically it's open to interpretation... "you see that painting? It's actually supposed to be a nebula! And that over there? It's the interior of a space ship. But the essence of it. And that over there? That's another space ship. They come in all sorts of different forms.... And those down in the laundry room? Those are demons and torture devices. Yes, they come in many different forms....")
More ominous signs from my apartment's new owners: they're ordering current residents to remove all their bikes from the bike-rack by a certain date or have them confiscated, explicitly to make room for new prospective tenants. Seems like they want to get rid of the current residents to replace them with higher-paying "luxury" tenants. Or perhaps they want to con new residents into thinking there's plenty of space among the existing bike racks when there really isn't.
OTOH my elderly mother pointed out something I had somehow never realized---ground floor apartments generally cost less, and it's apparently typical for people to associate "luxury" with a nice elevated view and higher floors. Whereas my apartment is half on ground level and half underground (built into the side of a hill, so the entrance is ground level from the courtyard, and the rear is half beneath the streets). Combined with the extensive water damage through almost every room of my apartment and the more than 20 year old appliances my apartment would probably be one of the least lucrative to try to renovate into a "luxury" apartment. So mine might be one of the last, if they even bother with it at all.
Trump's disastrous policies will probably make it harder for them to find "luxury" tenants and more expensive to renovate. Most of the current tenants are college students, many of them foreign, and I'd guess most of them are from the nearby third-rate school that many people go to because it's comparatively cheap and has classes year-round to get through a degree faster (and cheaper). Granted, there are probably also some University of Pennsylvania students (second-rate Ivy, with a few first-rate graduate programs) who tend to be more affluent, but aside from the science center most of the Penn buildings are a more substantial distance away. So I'd imagine that most of the higher-paying tenants they're imagining would be associated with the biotech hub that the city has been trying to create nearby. But Trump's freeze on grants, his tariff proposals, the chaos of his flip-flops, and again his hostility towards noncitizens is probably going to have a substantial negative impact on the local biotech industry as well, with few people looking to move into new luxury apartments.
Meanwhile, the cost of materials for apartment renovation has in some cases already gone up substantially:
Quote
The [effects of tariff proposals] have been felt not just in ground-up development but also in the multi-billion dollar industry for interior work and renovations.
Richard Jantz, an executive at Cushman & Wakefield who leads its project and development services team in the tri-state region [New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania---I live in Pennsylvania], said that a large office tenant recently put a roughly $20 million renovation of a space it occupies in Manhattan on hold because of cost escalations that coincided with the tariffs.
The duties have cascaded through the supply chain, Jantz said, raising the price of items like ceiling and acoustic tiles, which often use China-made fiberglass, or lighting systems, which can have internationally sourced components. [...]
[...] "That is largely based on the tariffs and a little bit of greedflation that we're seeing," Jantz said, referring to domestic manufacturers and suppliers who have been opportunistic by raising prices because foreign competition has grown more expensive.
The higher costs have also had an impact on the construction of apartments
https://www.business...truction-2025-3
So if they can't find enough "luxury" tenants for their first sets of renovated apartments, they might decide it's not even worth it.
OTOH the company that owns my apartment might correctly guess from my history that if they just jack up my rent as if they'd renovated but don't actually bother to renovate I might stay on if it's not utterly exorbitant or beyond my means---at least for another year or maybe two. But since I've barely been leaving my apartment (because of the pandemic) there's little point to me living in the city when it would be much cheaper to live with my parents and help them out in their advanced old age. And it turns out they're even older than I'd thought.
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